Argumentative Essay On Immunizations In Public Schools

When it comes to vaccinations, there are many different opinions on immunizing a child, especially when that child’s parent has a strong like or dislike towards vaccinating. Immunizations have been around for at least a thousand years and as technology advances more, there are new vaccines being designed to help protect our children from contracting contagious and sometimes deadly diseases, such as Bordetella pertussis, polio, and even influenza. For decades, all 50 states have required that parents vaccinate their children against various diseases, including polio and measles, as a prerequisite to enrolling them in public schools (Ciolli, 2008). Enrollment in public school requires up to date vaccinations in order to protect the children and even the adults from contracting and spreading a disease, possibly causing an epidemic. Although all public schools require immunizations, there are still children in the schools whose religion exempts the use of vaccinations. The goal of this paper is to further explain
Once the child recovered from the cowpox disease, Jenner then tried to infect the child with smallpox, but the young man proved to be immune. “It seemed that this attempt at vaccination had worked. But Jenner had to work on for two more years before his discovery was considered sufficiently tested by the medical profession to permit widespread introduction” (Alexander, 2003). Beginning in 1831 and culminating in 1835, due to increasing vaccination, smallpox deaths were down to one in a thousand. In 1853, it was deemed obligatory for all children born after the first of August to receive routine immunizations. By 1898, one hundred years after Edward Jenner’s unveiling of the vaccine, smallpox in London had fallen dramatically – to one in every 100,000 (less than 50 people per